So..How Many Advertisers Does Glenn Beck Have Left?

Ever since James Rucker of Color of Change called for a boycott of companies who advertise on Glenn Beck’s Faux Noise show last year, the number of U. S. advertisers has consistently dropped from over 100 to a handful. They are (as of September 1):

I’ve looked up some of these entities. Goldline, for example, sponsors many right-wing media talk shows. It, like Rosland Capital and Merit Financial, sells gold and silver; Beck has mentioned on his shows that he invests a lot in metals these days “for insurance.” The Foundation for a Better Life is a nonprofit organization headed by Philip Anschutz, a conservative Christian evangelical. The rest are law firms trawling for clients, who do personal injury cases or debt collection or credit negotiation. Lifestyle Lift is a branded face lift company. Easy Water is a water filtration company.

And then there are Faux-owned companies that advertise on his show, like The Wall Street Journal. In short, this is not the creme de la creme of advertisers that Beck’s show used to attract. In fact, these are the kinds of advertisers that have sprinkled digital subchannels like RTV, or Retro TV, or THIS.TV, or local TV channels here in Madison. The commercials are played in order “to keep the lights on” not necessarily for profit, profit that brings money to Faux. Beck’s inhabiting the low rent district when it comes to advertisers.
The boycott was called in reaction to statements Glenn Beck made on Fox & Friends in Spring 2009, during the dust-up involving Dr. Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge, MA police, that President Obama was a racist who hated white people.

This president has exposed himself, I think, as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or white culture. […] I’m saying he has a problem. He has a, this guy is, I believe, a racist.“

StopBeck.com, along with Color of Change, has been working to make Glenn Beck more accountable for his public comments.

To be clear: This effort is not about Glenn Beck’s political opinions. Rather, this effort is in direct response to Mr. Beck’s continued recklessness. Neither Fox News nor Glenn Beck will take responsibility for the willful lies, propagation of sexism or preying in racial anxieties. Accordingly, we are compelled to bring accountability back to broadcasting. We would prefer that Mr. Beck, regardless of his opinions, act responsibly.

StopBeck began on July 2, 2009. It was and remains primarily a Twitter effort.

In Britain, the Beck show has been running since February 9 without advertisements. Something like this is unheard of anywhere. How can a program on commercial television (or radio) run without ads? Faux Noise is not a philanthropy. A show without viewers and without advertisers can’t survive. It will be canceled.

Yet Murdoch must think Beck is integral to Faux Noise. It must not be the money. It must be the hate. It must be the attention people have fastened on this guy as the leader of some kind of “movement.” Yet Beck has a unique ability to get away with lies, half-truths and fallacies.

Excuse me? You must be joking. Nobody was keeping anyone from anything. No one was threatening these people with the loss of their lives or their jobs, or with torture or imprisonment, or anything that is patently illegal in this country. Not like black people at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Chinese dissidents at Tiananmen Square, and the “people power” spontaneous movement that stayed in the streets, and eventually toppled the oppressive regime of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. These are the kinds of people who have really put their lives on the line.

Wallace got right to the point: What gave Beck the gall to hold a rally on the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech, right in the spot where MLK stood as he addressed a very different crowd? If the rally was billed, in part, as a reclamation of the dream, Wallace asked, “reclaim the civil rights movement from whom?”

“People of faith are reclaiming it from politics,” Beck answered. “Race should not be in politics.” He equated the Administration hiring an employee who was a former Black Panther with voter intimidation by whites. “We’re seeing justice perverted on both sides for a long time.”

Here is where Wallace went much further than the Washington Post or CNN take on Beck.

Martin Luther King, Jr., he pointed out, was for economic justice. The “I Have a Dream” speech was part of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Economic Justice.” Labor leaders, including A. Phillip Randolph and John Lewis, shared the stage with King.

For all the economic discontent that fuels the tea party movement, it’s worth noting that the leader of the biggest tea party rally to date opposes the largest grassroots movement for economic justice in American history.

Wallace didn’t let him off the hook there, either.

“Martin Luther King was assassinated when he was leading the Poor People’s Campaign,” he told Beck. “That’s not your civil rights movement; it was Martin Luther King’s.”

He went on to show a clip of Beck’s famous quote accusing President Obama of harboring “a deep-seated hatred of white people and white culture.”

Beck repeated his comments that he regrets what he said. It wasn’t just white people–the President believes in “liberation theology”–which is not really Christianity, because it views salvation as collective rather than individual and sees the world in terms of “victim and oppressor.”

“Who made you the God Squad?” Wallace asked.

Apparently, though he’s a part of the right-wing media machine that is Faux Noise, Chris Wallace sometimes gets right into the killer mode that his daddy was famous for back in the day. And hits paydirt. There’s something about this whole thing that makes Wallace wary as well as slightly disparaging.

And race has always been in American politics, all the way to when the country was born, with putting that “3/5ths of a man” clause in the Constitution. Race was part of the presidential election of 1876, resulting in the end of Reconstruction. Race was a part of Southern elections that kept blacks from voting with grandfather clauses and literacy tests. Race made for the successes of George Wallace, Theodore Bilbo and Strom Thurmond. Anyone who knows their history would know this, and for once, Chris Wallace looked as if he hadn’t forgotten it either. Plus, everyone knew in 1963 what the March on Washington was about: not just Constitutional equality but economic equality. Even the Klan, full of mostly poor and working class whites, knew that. What does Beck think the term second class citizenship means?

This idiot is trying to separate King from what he believed, worked for, and died for. King was an adherent of the Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi who was loathed in his time by Winston Churchill, a die-hard supporter of white supremacy. (That’s why it took until after WW II before the British gave up the Raj under a Labor government that had defeated Churchill’s Tories.) And King, in his turn, is acknowledged as a progenitor of the liberation theology Beck has contempt for, along with the Berrigan brothers, St. Francis of Assisi, Edward Bellamy and Desmond Tutu. It’s evident that Mormon Beck has never even cracked open a book about King, his beliefs and his writings.

Furthermore, what does Beck really know about what the President believes? For most Americans, such questions can be intrusive. For a fifth of the nation who seem not to know any better, he’s a Muslim. And most people who adhere to liberation theology are Catholics.

Again, President Obama is currently a member of the United Church of Christ. But people will continue to look for that imam living in the wall and the prayer rugs.

Supposedly Beck and Sarah Palin are going to be teaming up again on September 11 for another big confab. Don’t tell me that the date isn’t a coincidence. But like the ‘baggers and Beckerwoods (H/T to Margaret and Helen) interviewed above, The Stupid will continue.

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